House of the rising Moonglum

So a while back I pointed y’all to a photojournal of a woman’s motorcycle ride through Chernobyl. Well mike pointed me to another story which points out that the first one was a little less truthful than would be hoped. Apparently there is an organization that gives tours, and that lady and her husband took the tour. Of course sometimes the urge to be cool is too much, and she had to make the story “cooler” than it was. Even going as far as staging some of the shots. Nonetheless, the pics of the area are certainly real, since she was actually there, but still. People are odd sometimes. *sigh*

Was Dick Cheney war profiteering? You decide.

It was my birthday and my wife got me Gladiator and SOCOM II, as well as cake making her the best wife ever!

The news focuses so much on the violence and scandal of the armed forces in Iraq that we sometimes forget that there are other things going on. One thing the army does do is plan the actual fight part of the fight. Have they managed to actually win the fight against the Medhi army while no one was looking? This article from the BBC hints that they very well might have. It talks about Muqty pulling out of Najaf, but then hints that that may be because his army is actually loosing.

Even the question of control of forces might have gone away. Another article suggests that the US armed forces in Iraq are already working with the local government.

As the gore speeches pointed out when the high ups (Rummy et al) get involved in the planning things go to hell in a hand basket. But on the ground, are the generals actually making lemonade out of lemons? I like these articles because they are not pro US, but rather hint at the places where things are working.

City stickers for SUVs now cost more than for normal cars. This makes sense, the heavier vehicles do more damage to the roads, and take up more parking room on the streets. And gas prices are going up. More like this please, no more SUVs in the city please.

Pam pointed me to this speech (real time stream via cspan) by Al Gore. This is an absolutely amazing piece of oratory. If he had given more speeches like this four years ago he would be the president now. I wonder if that’s what happens as you move up in politics. You get more and more speechwriters, and you, the politician, become removed from what you are actually saying. But once you lose, you write your own again, and get back to the core of what you believe. You aren’t trying to make anyone happy anymore, and just say what you believe.

The speech is about an hour long, but well worth it. It focuses on Abu Ghrab but looks at the reasons that we were there in the first place, and how a leadership that was willing to throw the geneva conventions out the window led to this outcome. Incredibly impassioned, and points the finger with a ray of clarity that I haven’t seen in a while.

Perhaps the thing I found most interesting is that when calling for people to step down, he does not call for the President to step down. I think he actually believes that the President was misled by his advisors, and he makes a strong case for that. It is filled with lots of good quotes, and he even blasts some of his friends.

I wonder if only he could do that. Someone who wasn’t the president, but who certainly had a lot of people behind him. An ex-president has a certain status that I think wouldn’t allow for speeches like this. And a regular politician, it would just look politically motivated.

Just amazing. If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it when you have a spare hour. (Oh and skip the intro garbage, it detracts.)

So I’m sitting here playing FFX, and remembering why I wanted to play Suikoden II first. There is no way I can go back and play a PS1 game after playing this. This thing is so beautiful it is just amazing.

And the first thing I learned from FFX? Examine means beat like mad. One of the first things Tidus does is swim into a room and “examine” a computer which lets him in to another room. When he “examines” it he bashes on it till the door opens. Heh.

So I’m trying to socialize the hedgehog. I’m hoping to someday be able to pet it on it’s back and actually have it enjoy it. Right now you can pet its face and she seems to like it. And you can pet her rum, and as long as you don’t make a noise or anything she will at least just sit there in terror, but if you touch her back, it’s all spines and huffing.

So I finally got her happily wandering about, even crawling into my hand, so back to the cage with her. It has been a long and trying night for her. But I forget the most important rule of hedgehog care, “if they figure something out it was probably random chance and they probably won’t remember how to do it in the future.” So I carefully put her in her cage, and assume that she is going to hide under/run on her wheel like she always does. (You know that 3″ animal has to put my gym trips to shame.) But when I go to drop her blanket in her cage, I didn’t notice that she had come out and was exploring right where I dropped the blanket. Suffice it to say there was much huffing. So I am all apologetic, and carefully moving things around, and she is huffing, and then runs straight for the food, and I accidentally whack her again and she looks at me indignantly as if to say “I’m done being scared for you, I’m eating!”

The trick to petting your hedgehog. Have a bowl of food handy.

Well finally somebody pulled out the Zimbardo study to look at what was going on in Iraq. This was really interesting to hear what he had to say, and it makes a lot of sense. The lack of consequence, and living in the now drives people to do these things.

What I found especially interesting was his comment that we all want to believe that we would be the heros, but the truth is most of us would just go along with the structure and do what everyone else was.

What I want to know is, are people like this being sought out to help design new prison systems for our military, and even within our own country. People actually study this stuff, given that there are known issues, maybe we can use that to make our systems functional?

Disclaimer: I am a practicing Lutheran, and have some disdain for that which came before, the then corrupt Roman Catholic Church, and after literalist Baptists so take my thoughts with a large grain of salt.

So I was sitting here reading this huge Newsweek piece about the Left Behind books and Revelations and all that, and thought I would write down some thoughts. Revelations was written at the end of the first century, after many of the other books in the bible and not accepted as part of the bible by the church body (such as it was then) until the fourth century. Many at the time disagreed with its inclusion. Twelve hundred years later Martin Luther called it “neither apostolic nor prophetic” The Eastern Orthodox Church does not read from it. And yet somehow it is currently the driving force behind most of the evangelical churches in the US. Fundamentalist Baptists are who I am thinking of here. Have things gotten as bad now as they were in the 1st century BC that we need to go back to Revelations in our religion? Do we still need that assurance of what is going to happen and how to order our lives? Does faith no longer suffice? Even the arch conservative Missouri Synod of the Lutheran church blasts the Left Behind books as an “unbiblical flight of fancy”. But the fact of the matter is the Baptists far outnumber the rest of us and they have sold a whole heck of a lot of those books. I think I’ll stick to “love thy neighbor as thyself”.

For another view the slactivist (thanks mike) rips apart both the article and the books. Though I think he misses a lot of the Newsweek author’s subtlety. In particular the fact that he asks both of them about giving all their money to the poor, where LaHaye answers, “You should see my taxes!”. I wonder if he counts that towards his tithing?

I saw Bush’s speech at the War College tonight. He has a five step plan for turning over power in Iraq. The first step is to admit that you have a problem.

In any case, the speech was painful to watch, as expected. He didn’t give any new details, and I think the point really was so that the Iraqis could see what we were planning on. But really it is their country and if they were interested enough to watch Bush’s speech they probably already knew.

On the other hand, Sen. Biden’s (D-Del) response was amazing. The only reference to it I can find right now is in the NRO but it is shockingly accurate. “Joe ‘the world is going to heck in a handbasket’ Biden” that was a great quote. They do miss the most important point though, which is that the 230,000 iraqi security personell that would be needed to keep the country safe (that include IDC, Army, border patrol, Police etc.) would take about three years to build up, and we will need to have our troops there in the mean time. And if they are going to be a sovereign government, who gets to decide how our troops are used? It was a really good rebuttal, but of course I would say that. NRO was right, the response is along party lines. Oh well.

So, I didn’t have time to start on my next game tonight in deference to Arabic homework, however this leave a perfect spot for suggestions for my next game. I’m thinking probably FFX, Xenosaga or Suikoden III, but GTAIII:VC is also waiting for me. Thoughts?

I have to give it to the artists who were actually able to pull of a touching scene in Suikoden II without resorting to FMV. It takes serious courage to do the single most touching scene in the game with 32 by 32 pixel sprites. The hero, sitting on the floor, holding his dying sister in his arms, reaches down to pick up her hand.

They pulled it off, and I sit here sobbing at some of the best 8 bit theater I have seen in a while.

*sigh*

OK, enough of that, a few more comments. Why on earth does a game that came out in 1998 have a character (one of the strongest in the game even!) named after the Kurdish militia. As we all know thanks to every news source in the world feeling the need to translate it every time the are mentioned, the Pesmerga are “those who face death”. Well that’s all fine and good, but why are they in a Japanese video game? Too odd.

And while we are at it, they are really going to mess up those Japanese kids about what strategy is. For the record attacking the army to let your leader slip into the opposing base and kill off the entire home guard followed by all their leaders is NOT A GOOD PLAN.

So now there is a Starbucks directly across from work! What is going on here?

Well a knowledgeable person at work (has friends working there) told me that apparently Starbuck’s has “targeted” NYC, and hopes to saturate the market there. Another friend (who may be reading this now) told me that there are already places in NY where there are two Starbucks across the street from each other. How many more do we need?!

So Of course I went out again last night. Oh well. But I’m glad I did because I got to hang out with Eve and see her boyfriend’s (Mike’s) band. He is a guitarist is a 20-30’s style jazz band. They had a torch singer who was, how to say… the talent, but Mike was awesome. I have heard a number of guitarists play at Jimmy’s with Dave during the jam session, but they all really sucked. So I was led to believe that playing Jazz guitar was hard. Well, I really liked what he did. Very cool. And I didn’t get to bed too late.

So, the last two days I needed to walk away from work for two blocks if I wanted my hot chocolate from Starbucks. Today I only need to walk two blocks out of my way while going to work. There are places in NY where you can see more than one Starbucks from a given location. How many do we need.

A good night, eating Malaysian food and going to bars. Malaysian food included scary things like frog legs and stingray. The stingray was actually great. When looking for a bar, it became clear that our local had very different tastes in bars than the visitors, so the visitors won and we went to a real dive. It was awesome, MO3 jukebox, cheap (for NY) beers served up by a hot waitress who occasionally threw in a free round, and a dog. Yes they had a dog in the bar who would bark for beer. And he would get it. This place reminded me of the places we used to go hang out in after Aikido. Health code? Never heard of it.

And I got to discover the key to drinking in NY. Everyone buys a round. That means that the more people you go out with, the drunker you get and the later you stay out. I suppose I should go to bed early tomorrow, but what is the chance of that happening?

I can tell that this is going to be a long week. I got up at 4:30 like normal so I could catch a 5:00 cab and be at work and chipper as early as possible. The New Jersey transit failed me for the first time (though from what I hear that is actually a fairly common occurrence, I guess I’ve just been lucky) and so I didn’t get to work until about 11. Fortunately work had been piling up all morning, so the fact that I was late didn’t matter. All that work was waiting for me. So now it is the evening, and I am still at work, and the best thing to do would be to go to bed, but no, I think I’ll go have some Pizza with Mike. Because there are so many of my friends in NY that I might not get another chance to see him, my evenings are so booked! I guess that is actually a good thing, but from here the week is looking very very long.

Going to New York again, so look for delayed blogs this week. Not only that, but I have a bunch of people in NY who I am supposed to visit during the week, so it will be even worse. Interestingly, for this particular week, because of a conference, I have more friends in New York than in Chicago. Well not actually, but it is crazy how many of my Chicago friends are in New York now!

Oh no! For the first time since I got married, I have bought ice cream from the store. So far, I have always made my own ice cream, which has made me very happy, as getting married brought the ice cream maker into my house. But the price of dairy has gone up (thanks to the price of gas) and Jewel had a really good sale on ice cream, so it was actually about half as expensive to just buy the pre made stuff as it was to buy the ingredients. Oh well.